CHINESE ROULETTE

CALL TO MADNESS
“CHINESE ROULETTE” BY DAMIR BARTOL INDOŠ AT &TD THEATRE IN ZAGREB

An insolent anarchistic satire. That is roughly the average opinion of the majority of audience after seeing the play “Chinese Roulette” by Damir Bartol Indoš and his followers at the &TD Theatre. During the vehement discussions of the supporters and opponents, it has been observed that “Chinese Roulette” is a fascinating shortcut to metaphysics, theatrical catastrophe in which actors do not know what they are doing, and a cleansed poetics of Carl Jaspers; however, that is always the case with Indoš’s artistic works. So, do not ask me what is “Chinese Roulette” about, because that is the question that, in the case of Damir Bartol Indoš, has not been readily answerable for the last 30 years.
This new endeavor is a kind of total performance in which music, stage objects and actors, in cacophonic cascades of movements, sounds and words, merge in a surreal world of a single highly aestheticized intellectual concept. “Chinese Roulette” is theatre of stark spectacle – on the stage that looks like storage of abandoned electronic equipment, a shaky cockpit or a crazy artists’ music studio – where the audience, laboriously following transmind events on the stage, can see what it wants to see.
The meaning of Indoš’s plays, “Chinese Roulette” included, can be sensed through the behavior of viewer’s whole body; the way you receive the sounds of motor-saw, movements similar to the movements of heavily retarded persons, dust and sweat of the participants and piles of stage material that look like a nuclear impact aftermath. Only later, by a kind of cold sweat illumination, like after a nightmare, you realize that it is all about an unfortunate girl, war or the inhumanity of the technological civilization. In “Chinese Roulette” all these audio-visual provocations appear somewhat cleansed; Indoš and his crew start off from Fassbinder’s theme about the relationship between terror and democracy, but then, without hesitation, they transform this, at least partially, coherent problem into thousands of signs, symbols and a performance that ensues exclusively from a kind of spontaneity, stream of consciousness of performers themselves and the pattern of stars on the sky that very night.
The audience can only forget everything they know about the theatre up to that point and surrender themselves to a stream of impressions at that impossible place. That charm of unpredictability in which the actors – Ana Karić, Vilim Matula, Nataša Dangubić, Tvrtko Jurić, Tanja Vrvilo and Damir Bartol Indoš – with complete presence of mind take part in some unconnected activities, while in the background a live band with a singer plays a particularly elegiac melody, somewhat resembling the ones at Rick’s bar in Casablanca, make this play – assuming that the audience accepts it – exciting in an odd way. That is the point at which “Chinese Roulette” stands or fails: if the audience decides to abandon logical explanation to what they hear and see and starts to make conclusions by the authenticity of the experience, than this insolent anarchistic satire has a chance to be “postdramatic theatre of change”, as described by &TD’s producer Nataša Rajković.
If we consider Damir Bartol Indoš’s project in the context of the Croatian, predominantly pale, theatre of diminished passions, then “Chinese Roulette” – which surely will not attract subscription audience, but will attract young audiences thirsty for madness, excitement and provocation – is a performance of authentic energy and brave exploration.
Bojan Munjin

Hostage crisis on theatre stage
IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HIJACKERS AND HOSTAGES?

After three decades of work on the margins of art production, D. B. Indoš has decided to abandon the safe position of peripheral activity and to enter uncertainties of institutional production. In that way, he has once again turned his radical, extreme, autistic, highly individual poetics into engagement with professional actors gathered for performance “Chinese Roulette” at &TD Theatre.
The play is dramaturgically built around the state of powerlessness by hostages in a hijacked plane, based on a historical event of hijacking of a passenger plane in Mogadishu and killing of the pilot by members of RAF, as well as on Fassbinder’s feature movie “Chinesisches Roulette” and documentary omnibus “Deutschland im Herbst”. The main scenic image is the play of the hostages in the hijacked plane. In a situation where they are completely powerless, in which there is nothing to lose, the hijacked passengers partake in the truth-game.

An Homage to Fassbinder
The truth-game is the central point of the homonymous Fassbinder’s movie as well. However, while in Fassbinder’s movie the game ends in tragedy, in Indoš’s performance it culminates with a collective hallucination, ecstatic music that finally liberates.
Truly an homage to Fassbinder, to that fierce and uncompromising critic of social order as the source of all evil, by thematicizing RAF’s terrorist action the performance speaks out about the superiority of the socially organized activity in relation to the privately established one. By criticizing the government apparatus, Indoš proposes consideration of the phenomenon of terrorism: “It is about organizations – one is hereditary and legitimate, the other is self-organized – it originates by itself and it abolishes itself. The first has a rule to sacrifice others for itself, while the other usually sacrifices itself for others or breaks the rule by sacrificing itself with others. Basically, there is a conflict between the aggressive spirit and selfish capital.”

Non-existent innocence
The situation that erases the boundaries between hijackers and hostages poses a question of the responsibility of the individual inside the wider social structure by negating the innocence as a possible category of value. In that sense, the choice between political activity and passivity does not exist. The key scene is a remake of Fassbinder’s sequence from the movie “Deutschland im Herbst”, the conversation with the mother which is permeated by the memories of nazi history, silence, fear of speaking in public and deep distrust towards democratic political system, but also, at the same time, by his deep powerlessness to stand up to the basic hegemonistic world view as well. Putting the social engagement in the foreground, Indoš underlines his move into the field of institutional, accepting the dangers of misunderstanding and betrayal. By calling it “the breakthrough to the central”, he expands the battlefield to socially more accepted theatre as structurally a better place for his own social and political engagement.
Vesna Vuković (translation: Vedran Pavlić)